


What Tony Does

by cyndisision



Category: The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: A.I.M., First Kiss, Fluff that accidentally grew a plot, Kidnapping, M/M, Pining, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-08
Updated: 2013-11-08
Packaged: 2017-12-31 21:19:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,764
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1036514
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cyndisision/pseuds/cyndisision
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve's an experienced Tony-watcher, so if anyone knows what Tony's like, it's him. Sure, Tony takes him out, buys him things, and steals his fries, but he acts that way around everyone, right? </p><p>Or, the day on which Steve was amazed to discover that when Tony was saying… well, anything, really… what he meant was, "I love you."</p>
            </blockquote>





	What Tony Does

**Author's Note:**

> My first fic in this fandom. Thanks to sev for betaing!

It’s just what Tony does. He hears you say you always wanted to go to the circus as a kid, but that was a dream so far out of reach of a kid growing up in the depression that you might as well have wished to hang out with Norse gods, and next thing you know you find yourself on a Stark Industries jet to Las Vegas.

“So what exactly are we gonna do there?” Steve says, waving away the flight attendant when she offers to refill his Coke.

“Well, I have a couple meetings in the morning, so your time’s your own then, but keep the evening free. No, no questions Cap—I’m not ruining the surprise!”

Steve has no idea what Tony thought he would like about Vegas. It’s only gotten worse since his Hitler-punching dancing-monkey show came through here in ’42: louder, and brighter, and seedier, and full of more things trying to get his attention.

But then he’s sitting in the best seats in the house at MGM Grand, drowning in the grace and skill of acrobats who run and kiss and fight on a moving, shifting, tilting stage as if it’s nothing. Steve gasps involuntarily and the tears roll down his face as the actors plunge from the heavens into the dim flicker of lights and shadows that veil the deep ocean. And after, when they go out for late-night sushi and Tony grins and steals the tuna tataki off his plate while he’s busy trying to put the experience into clumsy words—that’s when he understands why Tony brought him here.

He tries to thank him, not that thanks can really cover it, but Tony waves it off, because that’s what Tony does.

***

Everyone who reads the tabloids knows about the flashy side of Tony, but it’s far more common to find him pulling an all-nighter in the workshop with grease stains on his face and nothing to sustain him but the best efforts of well-intentioned robots.

Steve will put a sandwich down near Tony’s elbow, smile at Tony’s distracted grunt, and then he’ll curl up on the ratty old couch to make some sketches. He gets as deeply absorbed in the work as Tony does in his, and then a couple hours later Tony will notice the sandwich, and ask how long it’s been there, and then he’ll eat it in three bites while waving hologrammatic blueprints around with his other hand, because Tony can’t ever be doing just one thing.

Steve will flip back through his sketch pad and see that he’s made three sketches of Dummy trying to wear a funnel as a hat, or members of Tony’s latest fleet of mini cleaner-bots trying to figure out how to dance on wheels to a band that Steve thinks might be called Judas Preacher. The remainder of the sketches are of Tony, doing what Tony does, and Steve just knows that one day he’ll capture that little crinkle, the one that Tony gets between his eyebrows when he’s about to come up with something brilliant.

Finally, Steve lures him to the couch by mentioning some other pop-culture landmark that intrigues him, which Tony won’t be able to resist explaining further.

“You’d never heard of Blade Runner until today? Cap, as the world’s leading expert in Artificial Intelligence, I am personally offended that you’ve missed the entire ‘robots-are-people-too’ genre.”

By the second reel, Tony will be slumped against him, because he’s too much of a kid to get himself to bed even when he’s so tired he can’t stay awake through a whole movie. It’s just what Tony does.

Cap pulls the blanket over the both of them, drapes his arm around Tony protectively, and gets a little emotional when the replicant talks about the things he’s seen being lost in time, like tears in rain.

***

Tony’s always buying things, or making things, for the team. For the people he cares about. He brushes it off when anyone tries to thank him, but it’s what he does.

He swings into the gym on what might be a three-day caffeine high and throws Steve a pair of boots, one after the other.

“Try these on!”

“—Wha?”

“New polymer I’m developing for SI, but before I sent it to R&D I thought, hey, maybe this’ll solve that problem Cap’s been having with the whole ankle support vs. super strength thing.” He pauses expectantly. “So?”

“So?”

“Put ’em on, take ’em through their paces!”

He watches Steve for the first four minutes of his workout, and calls for a time-out before squatting down next to Steve’s foot and squishing thoughtfully at the ankle padding.

“Hmm.”

“They’re great, really! A huge improvement over the other ones.”

“Could be better, though. Little higher here, little thinner there…” He makes some impatient gesture at Steve.

“What?”

“Take ‘em off!”

“Geez, Tony, next you’ll be asking for the shirt off my back,” he jokes.

Tony looks up, one eyebrow raised and a little smirk on his lips, and Steve can feel the heat flooding his face from the chin up.

“Uh…”

He toes off the shoes without another word and lets Tony take them for further adjustment. Being suggestive is just something Tony does; he shouldn’t take it seriously. Probably should be grateful he didn’t actually _say_ anything this time. Still, he turns the temperature down on his post-workout shower, just to take some of the heat out of his embarrassment.

***

It’s no big secret that showing off in combat is a thing Tony does. Steve suspects that secretly it’s for the sheer love of flying. Soaring in with a last-minute save, aerial acrobatics, chasing down flying villains…

“On your six, Cap!” He’ll say, diving low to take out a Doombot that’s snuck in behind him, and pulling up at the very last minute.

Or, “Up high!” And when Steve raises his shield, Tony swoops by with a casual-looking gesture that bounces a repulsor blast into exactly the right spot to take out the giant mechanical octopus.

After a battle that feels like a real win, one with no major casualties and minimal property damage to take the shine off the victory, Steve sees the flush of exhilaration on Tony’s face when he pops the helmet open, the infectious child-like glee.

Steve gets it, he totally does. How many other people can say they’ve skydived without a parachute and lived? But it’s not flying.

Sometimes he thinks Tony’s trying to give him just a taste of what he feels.

“I’ll get you into position,” he’ll say, and grab Steve around the waist. In the armor, his grip is strong, but gentle. It took Steve a few fumbles to figure out the best way to go with it, which is to rest his foot on top of Tony’s, and wrap his arm around Tony’s shoulder, but now they’ve got it down to an artform.

Of course, Tony can’t be quite as carefree while he has a passenger, but after he saw the grin on Steve’s face the first time, what he does is he always puts some oomph into the takeoff, maybe tries to get a couple loops in if there’s time to mess around.

Steve will pick out his spot, and Tony will set him down gently before taking off again in a burst of repulsors and arc reactor light.

Steve buys some acrylics—first time he’s used them, and what an extravagance it seems—and paints a red-gold comet looping around the Earth.

***

When Steve is captured by A.I.M. goons two days into a three-day solo S.H.I.E.L.D. op, he tries to think about what Tony does in this kind of situation. Sure, he could give his name, rank, and serial number like a good little soldier, but Tony’s brand of snark can be a form of psychological warfare, and he’s been kidnapped alarmingly often over the years, so he’s had the chance to perfect it.

It turns out that A.I.M. aren’t particularly interested in hearing what he has to say, keeping him strapped down and pumped full of some IV fluid. He thinks he struggles, but it’s hard to know because he suspects that half of what he’s experiencing is a hallucination.

He dreams one of Tony’s ‘Intro to the 21st Century’ outings. It must be a dream, because he just goes along, has no control over what he says or does, and yet the details are more specific and mundane than any dream he’s ever had.

They’re in a bar, looking through fat books listing songs and musicians, most of which he’s never heard of. He can smell the stale beer, and feel the foam bursting out of the booth seat where the vinyl is split, things his mind would never normally bother with in a dream.

Tony gets up and sings a song about a purple haze in his brain, and Steve sings something that he had no idea he knew the lyrics to, about drinking and women. He feels strange and out of place singing it, and tries not to reflect on the irony that drinking has no effect on him. It’s familiar, though; maybe something he’s heard Thor listening to before.

He orders fries from the bar, looking forward to the game where he pretends to protest when Tony does what he always does, and starts stealing them from his plate—but he doesn’t have to protest, because Tony doesn’t steal his fries.

“Okay, Hasselhof, time to blow this popsicle stand,” says Tony, and that’s odd because Hasselhof is not one of his nicknames for Steve.

As they stand, Tony wobbles, and instead of putting a hand out to steady him, Steve just laughs, and claps him on the shoulder, and they get up to leave without Tony leaning on him like he usually does.

Then, they pass the bar, and he catches his reflection in the mirror, and he’s not Steve, he’s Thor.

Why would he dream about being Thor? Guess at least it makes a change from machine gun fire in the dark, or icy water swallowing him up.

“Don’t they do anything important?” he hears a voice say from behind a yellow beekeeper mask, and it’s a different dream now. He preferred the dream about karaoke over the dream about A.I.M.

A.I.M…

There was something regarding A.I.M., something he had to remember…

“Try another one,” a different voice says, and his dream fades into blackness.

***

He’s sitting on the familiar couch in the Avengers’ lounge when Tony passes, poking distractedly at a tablet in that way that Tony does.

“Oh, uh, hi,” Steve says, and his voice is quiet, hesitant in a way that he never is with Tony. “I’ve had some follow-up thoughts on that experiment you mentioned...”

“That’s more like it,” a voice breaks into his dream, and for some reason it brings the image of a beekeeper into his mind. “Now if we can just follow him into the lab…”

Steve rides down in the elevator with him, slinging around technical jargon that baffles him even as he says it. It sounds much more like something—

Like something Bruce would say.

Well, he dreamed that he was Thor; why not dream that he’s Bruce? It makes about as much sense.

Steve handles equipment that he’s never heard of, let alone learned how to use—and he does it with ease, as if he was born doing it. He’s never been on this side of Tony’s hyperfocus before; they run the same experiment over and over with tiny variations, falling into a natural rhythm, and it’s comfortable. Still, though, they’re talking about the work, and only the work. Steve didn’t think he would miss Tony’s unrelated ramblings quite this much.

He takes a break in the communal kitchen, wolfs down some leftover mattar paneer, waits in vain for his dream-self to microwave an extra plate for Tony, and goes back to the lab empty-handed. On Tony’s worktable he notices five or six full glasses of a thick green fluid, probably unappetizing enough when Dummy made them, but positively toxic now that they’ve been sitting there for hours. Or days.

“This is a waste of time,” comes the beekeeper voice from somewhere beyond the room, like a malevolent Jarvis. “Water purification? What do we want with this do-gooder crap anyway?”

Steve wipes a hand across his blurry eyes and blinks heavily; he’s getting tired. In a dream.

“I’m gonna call it a night,” he says to Tony.

“Uh-huh.” Tony’s peering at the results table, completely distracted. He has no idea what Steve (Bruce?) just said, but Steve doesn’t take offense; that’s just what Tony does.

What’s weird is that he’s actually leaving, and Tony’s letting him go.

 _No, no,_ he thinks, as his useless out-of-control body gets into the elevator and pushes the button for Bruce’s floor. _This is where you sit Tony down and make him take a nap. Use wiles and trickery if you have to; it’s the only way he’ll get any rest._

 

“Cut it,” says the disembodied voice, and Steve has a vivid image of a yellow beekeeper, along with a nagging feeling that he’s missing something. “We’ll try the next one in the morning.”

As the dream dwindles, he thinks about his enormous, luxurious, empty bed upstairs, and feels a stab of regret that it isn’t a tattered couch crowded with a sleeping Tony.

***

“If this works, we might actually get a look at some weaponry.”

Steve drifts, his eyes closed, his mind hazy and confused, and he wonders why a beekeeper needs weapons.

 _Those must be some impressive bees,_ he thinks with a sensation of floating hysteria.

He opens his eyes to see Tony’s face.

 _Tony! There’s something weird going on,_ he can’t make his mouth say aloud.

An object is put into his hands—a familiar gauntlet of brass cylinders, which he wraps around his wrist with practiced efficiency.

“Give that a try. I’ve tweaked the energy blast function some, so let me know how that goes.” Tony starts to leave, then pauses. “It, uh, shouldn’t have the same problems as last time, but Jarvis is on standby with the sprinklers just in case. I’d send Dummy down but he’s more likely to serve a smoothie to the fire than to put it out.”

Because he’s been on this merry-go-round a couple times now, Steve’s sensitive to the way that the twinge of exasperated humor he feels isn’t quite his own. He’s also aware of how Tony is suddenly taller than him, which is… weird. Definitely dreaming as Natasha, then. If it is a dream.

“Thanks, I think,” his mouth says with Natasha’s voice.

Tony gives a two-fingered wave on the way out the door.

 _Wait,_ he tries to make Natasha say. _Aren’t you going to come and watch me train with them?_

That is, after all, what Tony does. He gives people stuff, and then he comes and hangs out to chat while they use it. Often with inappropriate comments.

No, this time he’s on his own—if he can say that while sharing a body with Natasha. He takes a few minutes to marvel at her skill, her agility. He’s seen it often enough from the outside, but living it is incredible.

Lonely, though, without anyone to spar with (or be snarked at by).

“Great, so she can hit a target. We already know that,” says a beekeeper. “It's no use if we can't see inside the tech.”

Hearing the voice sparks a sudden barrage of memories: the S.H.I.E.L.D. op; A.I.M.; being restrained and drugged…

The dream is beginning to fade (though by now he’s pretty sure it isn’t a dream), sending him into a panic. No! Not now he’s just starting to figure things out!

 _Natasha!_ he thinks at her with all the urgency he can muster, and follows up with a few of those snippets of memory. The body he’s sharing pauses, stumbles in a most un-Natatsha-like fashion, but he’s gone before he can do anything else, lost to the darkness.

***

This time he’s expecting it, and he tries to take control of the ‘dream’ from the start.

He’s flying the quinjet, surrounded by worried and determined faces, except Tony, who’s playing things off in a casual way, because that’s what Tony does. Steve, who’s an experienced Tony-watcher, can tell just how fake it is.

“How did you get the idea to look for this, Tasha?” Steve asks in Clint’s voice. “He wasn’t even due back yet.”

He looks back over his shoulder to see her purse her lips.

“I just had a feeling.” She’s obviously irritated at not being able to explain it.

“Jarvis, take a note,” says Tony. “November 6th, 8:42 am: Natasha had a feeling.”

"Breaking into classified S.H.I.E.L.D. files on a hunch,” says Bruce. “Tony’s a bad influence on you.”

Steve sets down the jet a safe distance from the hidden A.I.M. base and picks up his bow.

Tony hovers next to him. “Where to, Hawkeye?”

Steve/Clint points out a spot on the cliff side overlooking the base, and Tony grabs him for the ride up there. It’s not that it’s uncomfortable or ungentle, it’s just functional, feels like something’s missing.

Nope, he can’t afford to think about that right now because, hey, there’s about to be a battle.

“Thanks, Iron Man,” Steve manages to make Clint say, “and good luck.” He feels Clint’s confusion at the sincerity, but Tony’s already taken off again, streaking down toward the base in a blur of red and gold.

It’s different, being up here looking down on the fight instead of in the midst of it all with the rest, but through Clint’s eyes the whole scene takes on a sharpness and clarity that he’s unused to. He studies the base, fires a couple of well-placed arrows, calls out targets to the others.

There—a skylight. Steve remembers, during a brief lucid period, that there was a skylight in the room where they’re holding him. As Clint, he forces himself to focus there, peering in until the scene becomes clear: two A.I.M. scientists hovering nervously around a gurney, holding clipboards in front of them like that’ll do something to protect them from Mjolnir. And on the gurney… wow, this is weird, looking down and seeing himself hooked up to that IV. There’s some kind of machine, too, attached to his head with wires, and a screen showing what he/Clint is currently seeing. His head swims at the strangeness of it.

It’s Clint’s slow, even breathing that drags him back, to where there’s nothing but the creak of the bowstring, and the muscles, just as taut, that hold it in place as everything focuses down, and down, and down to the arrow point, until his fingers release in sync with his heartbeat, and his eyes follow the arrow on its long trajectory to the IV bag, piercing it and spilling its contents. He starts nocking another arrow, and—

Steve jolts back into his own body, already coming out of his drugged haze. He surges to his feet, ripping off electrodes and medical tubing, and takes out the two A.I.M. scientists with punches they never see coming. Even as he does, the dream-machine explodes with Clint’s second arrow, and the door bursts open.

He drops into a fighting stance, wishing he had his shield and was wearing more than undershirt and boxers, but the figure that steps through sends a wave of relief crashing over him.

“Cap!” The Iron Man helmet starts retracting.

“Boy am I glad to see your face,” Steve says, and it comes out more heartfelt than he planned.

Tony gets an odd look, but squashes it down with a practiced grin, and he’s about to say something like, _That only goes to show you have excellent taste, Cap_ , but Steve knows better; he knows how Tony turns the truth into a lie when he doesn’t want to look at it. Three long strides cover most of the distance, and he stops in front of Tony, close enough to touch. Tony closes his mouth, the flippant comment unsaid.

“Steve?”

“Tony, I—” He breaks off, uncertain of where to start. “These past few days have made me see some things more clearly.”

“Such as?” Tony’s voice is hoarse, barely above a whisper, but Steve’s close enough to feel the warmth of his breath.

“Such as,” he says, his confidence growing, “you.”

Tony blinks away his confusion and tries for a joke, but it comes out brittle. “I think I fell asleep at my workbench again…”

“No, I’m the one who’s been dreaming,” says Steve. “And now, I’m awake.”

Tony reaches out gently with one gloved hand and places it on Steve’s chest, as if to check that he’s real.

Steve should feel vulnerable, standing here in his underwear with a weapon at his heart, but that doesn’t worry him. No, it’s the look in Tony’s eyes that makes him feel naked.

He cups Tony’s cheek with one hand and leans in, nearly close enough for their lips to brush. It’s an invitation, which Tony readily accepts. The kiss is gentle, but there’s nothing hesitant about it; they fit together perfectly. He’s never really let himself imagine this, but if he had, he would’ve expected Tony to act brash and pushy like he always does. This is more like a tender exploration, asking a question that Steve realizes he’s been longing to answer.

Steve wraps his arm around Tony and pulls him closer, which is awkward with the armor, but it doesn’t matter, because Tony is here in his arms, and why oh why haven’t they been doing this for months already?

“Because I wanted to be sure,” Tony murmurs against his lips, and he hadn’t realized that he’d said that aloud. Tony must feel his hesitation, because he rushes on to say, “Not of me; I always knew how I felt. Of you.”

Steve laughs, pressing their foreheads together. “I’ve always been a sure thing for you, Tony.”

The base shakes, showering them in a light rain of dust from the ceiling.

“Should we be helping out with this fight?” Steve says, before he’s drowned out by a colossal roar.

“Nah,” Tony replies, pulling him in for another kiss. “Sounds like they got it.”


End file.
